3 Skills To Effective Time Management: 3 Flow Steps

Have you ever wondered what the deal is with time management? Why do some people seem to have it all together? They manage tasks with ease, enjoy great social connections, work hard, and take care of themselves. Today it’s more important than ever to effectively manage your time!

What if you could:

• instantly manage time more effectively?
• easily pinpoint your recurring time management ‘problems’?
• take intuitive, natural steps to move you forward effortlessly?

Well, you can!

Understanding your natural time management style

The key to unlocking your hidden time management troubles is in knowing how you’re wired up, naturally! And there’s an instant way to find that out. The TSSI is an online time management and organizing personality style assessment. It has been proven to help thousands of people gain insight into what they do naturally with time and space. Knowing your natural time management personality type can help you make better decisions about time and live more in flow.

First, let’s examine some of the payoffs of knowing your natural time management style personality preferences. When you understand what is most natural and build your life and routines around your strengths, you move toward mastery. Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self–efficacy as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. One’s sense of self–efficacy plays a major role in how one approaches anything, even time management. So adjusting your mindset is an important first step toward time success. When you understand that you CAN make better decisions for yourself, you have a greater sense of self-acceptance. Therefore learning your time management personality type provides you with the opportunity to:

• make better choices regarding time.
• heighten your awareness.
• understand what causes you to feel stressed.
• feel more empowered every day.
• understand how others may view your time behaviors.
• identify how some relationships seem more productive than others.
• develop effective communication with others.
• increase your experience of “flow” as the natural unfolding of life as it happens.

And those are just some of the payoffs. Becoming more self-accepting is the fastest track toward happiness.

 “Being in touch with who you are is the single biggest secret of success. Deepak Chopra”

The Three Time Flow Steps

With your ultimate happiness on the line, let’s first examine the three major skills that help you navigate time. We refer to these three skills as ‘Flow Steps’.

A flow step is a broadly-defined, objective statement that captures one’s capability in a certain area. We use Flow Steps to define a grouping of the relative knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully manage time.

The three Time Flow Steps articulate the sub-tasks that work together to improve your ability to manage time. To manage time effectively, you need to know your own natural habits that lead to your success. People who are excellent time managers regularly demonstrate skills and abilities that help them master time. Time mastery involves managing priorities, attending to the details of your tasks and taking actions. These three skills are critical to your success with time. Let’s examine these three Time Management Flow Steps more closely.

• Flow Step #1 – Managing Priorities

  • Managing Priorities has to do with maintaining perspective when tension rises. It also involves using your energy wisely while working. Another important aspect is how you handle transitions between priorities. And finally, the fourth aspect of prioritizing has to do with how you juggle multiple tasks productively. Knowing your dominant Time Management Style Preferences can help you on every dimension. Self-knowledge helps you make better decisions about managing priorities.

• Flow Step #2 – Attending To Details involves

  • Attending to details encompasses everything about paying attention to details and the big picture. It involves managing parts and the whole project to produce results. Attending to details also means getting support when you need to accomplish tasks. It includes understanding your qualifications of what is a “good enough” outcome. Knowing your Time Management Personality Style Preferences can help you decide which details are most important. You’re better able to drop what’s not that important in favor of tasks that require your attention more often.

• Flow Step #3 – Taking Action involves

  • Taking Action encompasses knowing when to initiate movement towards an objective. It also includes balancing the need to jump in too soon against missing an opportunity. Taking Action also involves recognizing the difference between actions that will add to, or reduce tension in any given situation. And finally, taking action encompasses how one engages in, implements and responds to planning activities, and whether he/she leaves room for changes and the impact of unforeseen events. Knowing your dominant Time Management Personality Style Preferences can help you make better decisions about taking action when it best benefits you.

With your ultimate happiness on the line, knowing your time-management personality style will help you. With this awareness, you will be better able to develop effective ways to create routines and habits. Since your time is ultimately up to you, you need to figure these things out for yourself. What works for others, may need to be specially tweaked to work right for you. So, when you learn more about yourself and what is natural, it is easier to develop systems, routines, and habits that better suit your natural tendencies. Knowing your time management personality type helps you incrementally develop greater efficacy with time. Better time management is a surefire shortcut to a living a more satisfying life.

The Six Time Management Style Preferences

Hopper Time Style Preference

Hoppers™ enjoy variety and change of pace. They like the freedom to switch from one activity to another. They are often easily distracted and thereby get off-track. So, even though hopping from task to task keeps them productive, they run the risk of not finishing what they start.

On one hand, bouncing between tasks is energizing, but too many open items can ultimately cause Hoppers to be unproductive. How Hoppers manage priorities, details and actions can either cause tension or ease. If Hoppers are not aligned with natural behaviors, habits, and tendencies, their juggling act can lead to time delays and disappointingly incomplete tasks.

Hyper Focus Time Style Preference

One who has a dominant Hyper Focus™ Time Style tends to be absorbed by the details and often has trouble stopping one activity to transition to something new. This style preference gets so involved in what they’re doing that they may ignore reminders and cues to move on to the next priority. When Hyper Focus™ people are deeply involved in the task at hand, they can become so absorbed in the details, that they can lose track of time. Any of the Flow Steps can cause tension for Hyper-Focus personalities if they are not in alignment with their natural behaviors, habits, and tendencies.

Big Picture Time Style Preference

Big Picture™ individuals are big thinkers but often leave the details out of their plans — they find details less attractive than global strategies and tasks that call for spontaneity. Their lofty vision and high speed of action can cause them to overlook or ignore the essential small pieces necessary for success.

Perfectionist Plus Time Style Preference

Perfectionist Plus™ types thrive on details and an endless pursuit to ‘get things right’. As such, they have very high personal standards. They believe that they should be able to do nearly everything themselves and do it all well. They may be overly concerned about others approval and often have difficulty saying “No” to the requests of others for their time. Any of the three Flow Steps can cause tension for Perfectionist Plus personality types if they are not in alignment with their natural behaviors, habits, and tendencies.

Impulsive Time Style Preference

Impulsive™ types love to leap but may forget to look first. Enjoying the rush of adrenaline, they would rather act spontaneously than follow a pre-arranged plan. Even though Impulsive’s do plan, they often neglect to follow the plan and its pre-determined timelines. However, lack of planning, or diminishing its importance, can result in missed deadlines and disappointing others. Over time, this can lead to gaps in self-confidence in one’s ability to manage time effectively at all. Impulsive types tend to get bored easily and can find routine and maintenance tasks distasteful. Any of the Flow Steps can cause tension for Impulsive personality styles if they are not in alignment with their natural behaviors, habits and tendencies.

Cliff Hanger Time Style Preference

Cliff Hangers™ believe that they work most effectively when under the pressure of a deadline. They like having an adrenaline rush to help them focus, but this often doesn’t leave enough time to check work thoroughly or to handle things that might go wrong. Waiting to start until the last moment often causes added stress, tension and even missed deadlines. And, any of the Flow Steps can cause tension for Cliff-Hanger Time Management Personality Style Types if they are not in alignment with their natural behaviors, habits, and tendencies.

If you’d like more awareness, please check out the 6 organizing style preferences below.

The Six Organizing Style Preferences

Different organizing styles require different solutions. These are just a few ways to use your natural style to create a more pleasing workflow experience. Once you identify your dominant preferences you can begin to take steps to integrate more Flow Steps into your experience.

Read about each Organizing Style Preference:

• Everything Out Organizing Style Preference
• Nothing Out Organizing  Style Preference
• Saver Organizing  Style Preference
• Minimalist Organizing  Style Preference
• Straightener Organizing Style Preference
• No Rules Organizing Style Preference

Once you identify your Organizing Style preferences you can integrate Flow Steps into your experience, Click to read more about the 3 flow steps and 6 Organizing Style differentiators.

So What?

So what can you make of all these styles? Regardless of your dominant Time Style Preferences, you may still struggle at times. Regardless of what life throws at you, the solution can be simple. When you understand your natural Time Management Personality Style Preferences you can work to ease ‘time tension’ in your life.

With heightened awareness, you’re better able to make choices that reduce your stress and move ahead with ease and harmony – and live your life in flow. Setting yourself and your systems up to live in flow, makes you more productive and satisfied by working from the inside, out. There are six style preferences each for time management and organizing your space. The Time & Space Style Inventory (TSSI™) will help you pinpoint your unique flow formula and better understand what is happening when ‘tension’ occurs in your daily living. When you figure out your dominant personality style preferences, you’ll be able to remedy your spaces and time habits for good by taking the flow steps that will ultimately ease your tension.

Click the link for more information about the Time & Space Style Inventory, leave a comment below, or email us at cena@sanespaces.com